Episodes

Denise Y. Ho is assistant professor of twentieth-century Chinese history at Yale University, and the author of "Curating Revolution: Politics on Display of Mao’s China" (2018). Using a wide variety of primary sources, including Shanghai’s municipal and district archives and oral history, "Curating Revolution" depicts displays of revolution and history, politics and class, and art and science. Analyzing China’s “socialist museums” and “new exhibitions,” Ho demonstrates how Mao-era...

On the eve of International Women’s Day in 2015, the Chinese government arrested five feminist activists and jailed them for 37 days. The Feminist Five became a global cause célèbre, with Hillary Clinton speaking out on their behalf, and activists inundating social media with #FreetheFive messages. But the Feminist Five are only symbols of a much larger feminist movement of university students, civil rights lawyers, labor activists, performance artists and online warriors that is prompting...

Speaker: Stephen Owen, Harvard University Stephen Owen is a sinologist specializing in premodern literature, lyric poetry, and comparative poetics. Much of his work has focused on the middle period of Chinese literature (200-1200), however, he has also written on literature of the early period and the Qing. Owen has written or edited dozens of books, articles, and anthologies in the field of Chinese literature, especially Chinese poetry, including An Anthology of Chinese Literature:...

Speaker: Stephen Owen, Harvard University Stephen Owen is a sinologist specializing in premodern literature, lyric poetry, and comparative poetics. Much of his work has focused on the middle period of Chinese literature (200-1200), however, he has also written on literature of the early period and the Qing. Owen has written or edited dozens of books, articles, and anthologies in the field of Chinese literature, especially Chinese poetry, including An Anthology of Chinese Literature:...

As the role of “strongman” leaders on the world stage appears to be on the rise, this panel examines “strongman politics” in a comparative context. In May 2018, Time Magazine proclaimed in an article that “The ‘Strongmen Era’ Is Here” (Time, May 3, 2018). Highlighting Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping’s tightening authoritarianism in Russia and China, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Rodrigo Duterte, and Viktor Orbán’s undermining of democratic norms in Turkey, the Philippines, and Hungary, it...

Xi Jinping is consolidating power just as China has embarked on an unprecedented push to become a global and technological power. Xi’s followers are fashioning an economic and administrative system that they hope can achieve these ambitious goals. Some parts of this multi-stranded program will succeed and some will fail. The global economy—and global power relations—will depend on the balance between success and failure, and the ways in which Chinese manages the success and failure of...

In the drama of Chinese history, the environment - and the Yellow River (Huang He) in particular - plays a major role. The river's breaching of its northern banks in the year 1048, for example, precipitated an environmental catastrophe that caused political and economic turmoil in the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127 CE). Ling Zhang examines this catastrophe to reveal new information about China's transition from the Tang to the Song dynasty and prompt questions for how China handles its...

China's leaders often invoke the "century of humiliation" at the hands of foreigners as a means to promote national unity and garner public support for China's return to great power status. An historical metaphor for outside intervention is the vivid image of foreigners "dividing China up like a melon." As Rudolf Wagner explains, however, this metaphor has a more complex history, which highlights a continuing reverse-engineering of history by China's leaders for political gain. Rudolf Wagner...

From 1966 to 1968, youth in urban China were embroiled in factional battles in what many of them believed to be a revolution of a lifetime. Guobin Yang explores how this factional violence was the result of the enactment of China's earlier revolutionary tradition, and how echoes of this tradition persist in online forums. Guobin Yang is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Sociology and Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication and Department of Sociology at the University of...

Mary Gallagher is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, where she is also the Director of the Center for Chinese Studies. Professor Gallagher researches the relationships between capitalism, law and democracy, which she examines in her latest book, “Authoritarian Legality in China: Law, Workers and the State” from Cambridge University Press. In addition, her research also focuses on the resilience of China's authoritarian system and the use of censorship by the...

Kaiser Kuo is a household name among China watchers as host of the Sinica Podcast with Jeremy Goldkorn, a current affairs podcast that invites prominent China journalists and China-watchers to participate in uncensored discussions about Chinese political and economic affairs. Before launching the podcast, however, Kaiser was the guitarist in the Chinese heavy metal band "Tang Dynasty." Kaiser's story of China's burgeoning rock & roll scene in the late 1980s colorfully fuses the music,...

As President Trump returns from his first visit to China as Commander-in-Chief, how is U.S. foreign policy reacting to a new administration in Washington and a new rising power in Beijing? The Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation present Ambassador and Harvard Kennedy School Professor Nicholas Burns, in conversation with Jeeyang Rhee Baum, Ezra Vogel, and Odd Arne Westad, moderated by Michael Szonyi. Speaker: Ambassador (Ret.)...

The collapse of communist regimes at the end of the Cold War led to a “third wave” of democratization across the world. Despite this, five nominally communist regimes still survive, including the ruling Chinese Communist Party, and today a rising number of nation states appear to be embracing authoritarianism. Martin Dimitrov, Associate Professor of Political Science at Tulane University and a former postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, talks to the “Harvard...

Roderick MacFarquhar, Leroy B. Williams Professor of History and Political Science and former Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, explores the rise of Xi Jinping. Hosted by Ezra F Vogel at Harvard University's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.

The Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies presents a panel discussion to celebrate the launch of our world-debut exhibition of Cultural Revolution-era artworks. This is the first time that these works, including "dazibao" (or “big-character posters”), have been publicly displayed since the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Panelists: Denise Ho, Assistant Professor of History, Yale University Jie Li, Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University Roderick...

The Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation present a panel discussion with exclusive insight and opinions on China’s 19th Party Congress. Moderator: Mark Elliott, Vice Provost of International Affairs and Mark Schwartz Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History, Harvard University Panelists: Anthony Saich, Director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and Daewoo Professor of International Affairs. Joseph...